Game Review

Arcade Hoops Basketball Review

Arcade Hoops Basketball is a simple beast. Odds are you've played it's real-life counterpart before, too. No, not basketball. Have you been to a fair? Theme park? Arcade? Large movie theater? It's the one where you have to chuck a ball through the hoop as many times as possible before time runs out and you may or may not win a cheap prize.

Being a simple beast, it doesn't strive to do a whole lot. Touch and hold a ball, flick the touchscreen, put the ball through the hoop, get a top score, high five yourself. Easy peasy. There are three "modes" to choose from, which boil down to the basket being close, three-point distance and alternate-between-the-two-halfway. Your strategy never really changes, just flick slightly faster to shoot further.

The graphics and sound are simple, with essentially one frame of hand-animation when you shoot, a backboard that looks like a backboard and basketballs that are round and sort of rotate when you let go of them. Even the game's title is effortless, albeit redundant and somewhat nonsensical (can't wait for the sequel, Outdoor Goal Soccer).

So is it fun? Well, kind of. There's a simple pleasure in racking up high scores, but it's not enough of a hook to make you really want to play it more than once or twice. Can you draw a straight line quickly over and over? Congratulations, you've mastered the game.

At least it saves your scores for each mode! That's considerate.

Conclusion

Arcade Hoops Basketball is not a terrible time-waster, but it never tries to be anything more than a very simple diversion. Only the most diehard basketball fans will care enough to keep firing it up after the first few times around.

it sounds like what i pretty much expected from the pr description. It's a simple app time waster. I can actually see a bunch of people downloading this and having a good time. I guess there are just some things that don't even need to be reviewed with a numeric score (clocks, calcs, mixed messages etc.) because they aren't bad for what they are. They just aren't much.

This game is worth the 200 points, it is fun to just pull out and play on the go. I don't necessarily recommend it over other games you can get, but if you wanna shoot hoops on your DSi, then get this.